Asbestos-Free Cereal

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Wait, Don Draper did that for cigarettes in 1960. How can you hate him?

"The best part of this As Seen On TV item is the commercial itself, which expresses the product's versatility, which allows it to be used on either a gas or electric stove top - you know, like pretty much every other pot in existence."

The ad can imply that competitors' products do not do this because they fail to measure up to the same standards. After all, if this brand of dry cereal proclaims so loudly that it is 100% fat free while the rest are silent, that means other brands are just dripping with lard, right?

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To be clear, this trope does not refer to labels that are used mistakenly or fraudulently. It's only Asbestos Free Cereal if the advertisement is entirely true, but misleading in that the claims it makes are actually insignificant (they apply to all products in that category, as in the page image, or just have no bearing on the product's quality at all) or negative (somewhat rarer), repackaged to seem positive and desirable. A clear example would be any vegetable-based product being toted as "cholesterol-free", because cholesterol is only found in animal fat, so there's no reason peanut butter would have it in the first place.

The technical term for this kind of statement is a "preemptive claim" and depending on the jurisdiction it may be illegal or subject to certain restrictions, regulations or required disclosures.

For the rare cases in which advertisers just flat-out admit the product they're shilling has many flaws, see Our Product Sucks.

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Straight examples:

Good, Pure, Real, 100%, and All-Natural

7Up once advertised "5 all-natural ingredients" for about a month. These five natural ingredients included high fructose corn syrup and natural flavors.

McDonald's emphasizes its "hand-picked Arabica coffee beans" in its McCafe advertisements. Arabica is usually considered a better product than Robustanote Robusta gives thickness and bitterness to the coffee while Arabica gives a richer flavour. Coffee brands usually mix them to attain a thick yet flavourful coffee, with some making a selling point of using 100% Arabica. Also, coffee beans come from different countries and are sometimes mixed, so some people will like e.g. Colombian coffee more than they like Brazilian, regardless of the percentage of Robusta, but the fact is that almost all coffee beans are hand-picked, due to the temperamental nature of the coffee plant making mechanization very difficult. And most coffee beans are Arabica, anyway.

Maxwell House did this same "100% hand-picked Arabica" schtick long before McDonald's thought of it, and quite a few brands in the US quickly followed suit. Folger's, significantly, does not make any such claims, mostly because their product does in fact contain a large percentage of Robusta beans. This stems from a price war in the 60s and 70s that, among other things, had companies moving to using only cheaper, harsher tasting Robusta beans. The practice had nearly killed the coffee market by the early 1980s.

Related to the whole wheat example: Quaker has proudly advertised that all its hot oatmeals are whole-grain oats — including the instant oatmeals with flavoring. Neat trick.

Some companies market Himalayan salt as non-GMO, even though sodium chloride with (or without) impurities cannot be genetically modified because there's no genetic material to modify. Also, it's actually mined in Pakistan (and there are similar coloured salt deposits in other parts of the world, too).

After the gluten free craze, a lot of products have started proudly claiming to be gluten free, that never would contained any gluten under any stretch of the imagination. Like corn products, fruits, and Salt (see non-GMO salt above.)

Numerous chain restaurants (including Chipotle) boast about using only "real ingredients," as if their competitors use imaginary ingredients.

Similarly, lots of restaurant chains like to brag that their chicken, beef, and pork are raised without hormones or antibiotics, as if they're going above and beyond when, in Canada and the United States, hormone use is outright illegal in chicken and pork and antibiotic usage is very strictly regulated so that meat containing antibiotic residues can't be sold. In other words, they're basically bragging that they've met the minimum standard of food quality.

Organic Valley brand milk advertises that its milk contains, among other things, no toxic pesticides. The commercials do not seem to be running this way for humor value, either.

Free, Clear and Hypo-Allergenic

In The New '10s, it became quite a common selling point to advertise a product as "gluten-free," thanks to a string of fad diets at the time that suggested reducing or eliminating it. Gluten is a protein found in grains, like wheat, rye, and oats. While there are some gluten-free products made for people sensitive to it, a lot of these products never had any gluten in them to begin with. note It can be very helpful for those who are sensitive or allergic to gluten; having otherwise logically gluten-free foods marked as gluten-free, which makes shopping much less challenging. Further these claims also imply that the food was prepared in a facility where no cross-contact with potential gluten sources could happen as this can still cause issues for those with a gluten allergy.

Wegman's Cola, the generic version of Coke sold at the (rather upscale) Wegman's supermarket chain in the US Mid-Atlantic region and Northeast, is marketed on the label as "Gluten free", "Lactose free", and "Vegan". So it has no wheat, milk, or other animal product. note We're not sure if Jones Turkey Soda did in fact contain animal products in its "natural and artificial flavors." A true exception is Calpis, also known as Calpico in English-speaking regions, which is fermented, sweetened, and carbonated milk. However, it looks just like milk, so a lactose intolerant person would be careful around Calpis anyway.

There's at least one type of white cooking wine that advertises itself as "Gluten free" but Fridge Logic kicks in when you realize that wine is made out of grapes, so there is never gluten in it. Even rice wine, which is made of "glutinous rice" is gluten free, due to an odd language quirk. explanation "glutinous" just means "sticky" and is related to the word "glue", and that happens to also be the root of the word "gluten", otherwise the two are unrelated.

This also goes for non-flavored liquors such that label themselves "gluten-free." Gluten is a protein that is present in most grains that liquors such as whiskey, gin and some vodkas are made from, but gluten doesn't make it through the distillation process. Rum, tequila and brandy are never distilled from any grains by definition, so a gluten-free label on any of those is pretty much a secret gullibility test for the consumer. Why non-flavored? Many flavoring agents are made from malted ingredients, so people with an actual gluten intolerance should proceed with caution.

Another joiner on this particular bandwagon is Santa Cruz Organic Peanut Butter, which is 100% made from peanuts and has the label highlighting that it is "gluten free". Even brands of peanut butter that aren't 100% peanuts generally don't use gluten-containing products. While there is certainly an opportunistic advertising element to all of these examples, it's also a bit Truth In Television. To legally declare a product "gluten free" you have to do gluten testing, maintain separate production facilities, etc. Gluten contamination can occur before the product even exists — for instance, oats growing in a field where wheat was once planted.

A brand of cornflakes has started advertising itself as "same taste, gluten-free!" Except there's no measurable amount of gluten in corn (Zea mais) flakes. So if the new, improved, possibly-certified cereal tasted different, that would be a reason to worry. Because, you see, it would not be the same, already-gluten-free cereal anymore. This same line of logic extends to popcorn advertised as "gluten-free," which are sometimes made from the same strain of corn as corn flakes used in cereal.

One brand of cereal which applied the "gluten free" label to its boxes. The back of the box acknowledges that the oats from which the cereal is made would not have gluten, but they changed their agreement with processing facilities to ensure no cross contamination from wheat products, making this a useful advertisement.

A restaurant sign extols passersby to "try our new gluten-free fries!" Potatoes normally don't have any gluten. Except most fries are fried in the same oil as gluten products, and certainly stored with them and some of the salts/miscellaneous added extras contain gluten. It's super necessary to label what you have that's fully non-contaminated, even if it seems pretty dumb to the layperson, because of life-threatening conditions like coeliac disease. Also note that some fries are breaded.

A 2018 series of adverts for Herbal Essences shampoo commercial proudly proclaimed◊ their shampoo to be 100% gluten-free. Even aside from the fact that of course it would be, gluten doesn't harm people with a sensitivity to it or coeliac disease unless it's ingested. (And if you're eating your shampoo, you're going to have bigger problems than the gluten anyway.)

Another spotted-in-the-wild example of gluten fever: gluten-free shredded coconut. And, in the same shop, gluten-free lentils. Not even a grass, people.

Same shop, same manufacturer - gluten-free baking soda. Which has no right to be contaminated by gluten in any way during production, because it's made by, basically, mixing two chemical solutions and waiting for the soda to appear.

Also spotted in the wild: gluten free pizza. In and of itself, understandable (as there are people with gluten sensitivities). But the fine print: *Not suitable for individuals with celiac disease. Which is the main reason someone would avoid gluten to begin with! That's like selling insulin and saying it's not suitable for anyone with diabetes.

A Scandinavian cookie brand boasts that their cookies, which are light brown like most cookies, are "free of artificial coloring." A scientist interviewed in the newspaper noted that this is nothing special, since for the most part, cookies aren't blue.note Brown could, however, be due to use of caramel or of Brown FK, both amongst the more dubious of artificial colours; but most brown bakery products are brown due to natural caramelization.

The anti-GMO movement is so popular now that some manufacturers put non-GM labels on things like salt, water◊, and baking soda◊. Since DNA is only found in living organisms, it's impossible to genetically modify salt, water or baking soda because they don't have any genes to modify in the first place.

There was a bit of a scandal in the Netherlands some years ago when chupa chup lollies came on the market and made a big point about 'being healthy' (on account of the fruit-juice in it). Of course they aren't healthy: they're full of sugar, and the fruit is way too processed to have any nutritional value. They were laughed off the market.

Skippy Peanut Butter used to advertise itself as "cholesterol free," which is a true claim... since no brand of peanut butter has cholesterol. (Cholesterol is strictly from animal products, which generally don't go into peanut butter.)

The label on bottles of the mineral water brand Hydr8 boast that it's completely free of sugar, calories and colouring. Of course, this is true of water in general. You might as well brag that "This novel from Random House all include words that you can read to get a story!" The only difference is, it's possible to make an unreadable book. If you've managed to make water that contains one of those ingredients without additives, then you're a Reality Warper and what are you doing selling water in the first place?

Jell-O sugar-free instant pudding mixes also boast that they are "fat free". All instant pudding mixes are fat free, they're just sugar, cornstarch, flavorings, colors and preservatives. The fat content depends on the milk you're using.

Advertising meat as growth-hormone free is meant to appeal to the "natural foods" crowd. However, the use of growth hormones and anabolic steroids in cattle and poultry-rearing have been banned since the 1950s, at least in the U.S., though it's still a possibility when dealing with imports and outsourcing.

There's a photo going around of a bunch of seedless watermelons being labeled "Boneless"; obviously, since watermelon is a fruit, it doesn't have bones. A reply theorizes the possible reason why they're labeled such: an associate ran out of "Seedless" stickers to use, with the store only having "Boneless" stickers to work with.

"Fuck it. Seeds are like bones, right?"

Some bicycle drinking bottles made of soft plastic are advertized as being free from Bisphenol A (BPA). The thing is that BPA is not used for soft plastics, but for polycarbonate. And of course BPA is not the only harmful substance that plastics could release into water.

Ditto with Trident Xtra-Care gum, which advertises calcium-based Recaldent to "remineralize" teeth. (Recaldent, of course, is just a combination of the prefix "re-", the word "calcium", and the French "dent", meaning tooth.)

"Only Birdseye peas have Birdseye's Vitamins In Peas guarantee!" Yes, because you are hardly going to give that marketing gimmick to your competitors are you?

Brompton's bicycles claim to have over X amount of specialized parts on every bicycle (usually in the triple digits). Brompton also patented each part in a way that no other company can make parts that will fit on a Brompton. What this means is that Brompton has a monopoly on its parts. If your Brompton needs even the slightest bit of maintenance or repair, be prepared to pay through the nose because Brompton can charge any price it wants. (By contrast, there is a standard on most bicycle parts that frequently need repair, such as brakes and inner tubes, that nearly all other bicycle manufacturers follow, including those of higher quality than Brompton's.)

Back in the early days of DVD, commercials and covers would advertise, "Now on video [presumably meaning VHS] and Disney DVD..." The only difference between a Disney DVD and any other DVD is that it has a Disney movie on it. It is at least possible that Disney built their own encoder that worked far better than others - but not likely.

Blu-ray Discs released in 2010 or later claim to have "Disney Enhanced High-Definition Picture and Sound." How exactly this differs from the high-definition picture and sound of the other big studios' Blu-ray Discs doesn't get detailed.

Several brands of gasoline have contained trademarked additives over the years, such as Shell's "Platformate" or Chevron's "Techroline" (later "Techron"). As with Retsyn in Certs, no other gasoline could claim to have these additives, even if they contained additives that were chemically identical.

Sucrets once advertised that for sore throats, their product is listed in the Physician's Desk Reference. Yes, it is. Because the Physician's Desk Reference is a list of every medication in existence. "Listed" is not the same thing as "endorsed."

Richard Feynman's spotted-in-the-wild examples were frying oil that doesn't soak into things when you fry them (as he explains, as long as the temperature is right, no oil soaks, otherwise any does) and warm pants that don't only warm you up, they also isolate! This particular manufacturer, though, changed his commercials when advised that pants may isolate, but they don't generate heat (except maybe electric pants).

Other Claims (to be sorted)

Nutella:

Nutella's main sales-argument is 'gives you energy'; yeah, refined sugar tends to do that. Sugar is also the main ingredient in 'energy-drinks', with the caffeine and taurine more of an afterthought.

In the US, they claim that being made with "hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa" mean it's a great snack for your kids, and that it can be put on healthy foods to make them taste better. Problem is, they leave out the large amount of sugar, and that you'd probably be better off using peanut butter on your whole-grain toast (see above for why that's not necessarily a great claim, either).

The reason for this advertising? Nutella was marketed as "gives you energy" in post-World War II Italy, where its dense calorie content was helpful for giving Italian children a cheap, quick rush of energy with their breakfast. In America? Not so much.

If one looks at the calorie count for Nutella, it's true, it really does give you energy. If you're using it on a sandwich, maybe more than a quarter of all your energy in the day, maybe more than half!

In an inversion of this type of claim, free UK newspaper Metro once published a letter from a reader complaining that processed foods "have no energy" (presumably using "energy" in some unspecified mystical-nonsense way, rather than in the scientific sense of "that which enables work to be done"). The following day, it printed another letter, replying that the real problem is that processed foods have far too much energy, and that's why there's an obesity crisis.

Geico likes to advertise that switching to their service "could save you up to 15% or more". Read that again slowly. Switching COULD save you UP TO 15% or MORE. You could save less than 15%, 15% exactly, or more than 15% (or you might even lose money, but I'm guessing one wouldn't switch). In other words, switching could possibly change the amount of money you pay for car insurance, or maybe it couldn't. That's a pretty easy target to hit when it covers all possibilities.

OANN's Graham Ledger likes to sign off every one of his newscasts by reminding people that it's archived in the Library of Congress. This is true for nearly any creative work published in America, up to and including all of Twitter.

Bell Canada advertises their high-speed Internet as "perfect for laptops". Well, it really doesn't matter what form of computer you're using, but sometimes an included Wi-Fi router does come in handy.

Tales of Symphonia did one better: They advertised "over 80 hours of gameplay". Actual time to the completion of the storyline, with obnoxious Level Grinding and dubious Side Quests: around 40 hours. But they've got a New Game+ feature, so that's forty hours, twice, which is totally the same thing as eighty hours!

Parodied on the back of a Compilation Re-release of Earthworm Jim 1 & 2, which advertised 700 or some-such hours "(yes, hours!)" of gameplay, for two games that aren't even long by side-scroller standards.

Battery ads are also guilty of this.

Companies advertising that their alkaline batteries last two to four times longer than other brands of battery. But they always fail to point out the type of battery they are comparing to is cheaper zinccarbon batteries rather than similarly priced alkaline ones. If compared against similar alkaline batteries, there would be next to no difference in length of use. Duracell is a major offender with this, most notably with the original "Duracell Bunny" commercial from the 1970s.

Evereadynote at the time, the creator of the Energizer brand; these days Energizer is the parent company, and Eveready their subsidiary created the Energizer Bunny campaign as a direct shot against Duracell. Duracell did successfully sue Eveready, though, over their "Nothing Lasts Longer" claim in the Energizer adsnote Which were actually true — nothing lasts longer, although all of their alkaline competitors last just as long. Subsequently, the fictional competitor "Supervolt" was created as a Brand X parody of Duracell, still implying that Energizer can outlast their alkaline rivals.

Similar to the "Over X hours of gameplay!" listed above, many games would advertise having "Over X characters!" or something, and then would have X+1. A particularly bad example is Baten Kaitos: It advertised "Over 1000 Magnus!", and it has 1022. Which included things like plot and sidequest items, photos you take of enemies to sell them for cash since there are no Money Spiders, healing expendables and a whole bunch of crap in general. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 also uses this on the back of its European packaging which states that the game has "more than 300 quests" note exactly 300 plus the bonus quest and "over 50 available jobs." note 51 plus 5 special jobs unique to certain characters.

A surreal example is Empire Earth, sold on the promise of containing "over 500 000 years of history". Five hundred thousand of those years are devoted to the Neolithic age, which a player can and probably will want to pass through faster than banging two rocks together, in order to spend more time in the more interesting ages adding up to nearly five thousand years beyond the advertised half a million.

The Football Manager series has turned its promotion of the yearly updates by claiming that the game has hundreds of changes. Football Manager 2014 is claimed to have over 1000. Of course, these changes include every single minor bug fix, change in UI, and any scrap of change, even if the change is for the worse.

An advertisement for a device amplifying one's hearing starts out by cheerfully saying "How would you like to have SONIC HEARING?!" 'Sonic' is, by definition, a part of hearing.

In 2011, the Belgian cable company Telenet has been advertising its internet via the cable as "Surf at the speed of light!" Virtually all internet traffic uses fibre-optic connection at some point in the process, which moves at the speed of light. The only thing that improves download speeds is how many signals can be sent at the same time over the same connection.

When Wendy's was going through a major marketing overhaul, aside from "better quality ingredients" (such as red onions instead of white, which is more personal taste than anything), they began to advertise their French fries as "natural cut". This was an odd but enticing phrase, especially since they were now also seasoned with sea salt and cooked (not "fried") in different oil. After poking and prodding, it turns out that "natural cut" simply means "the skins are still on when we cut them". Also, the claim about their fries being seasoned with sea salt is technically correct but misleading since it's trying to make the salt they use sound more exotic. While a lot of salt comes from mines, much of it comes from the sea, and there's a chance it's the exact same salt in the shakers.

Atari's Jaguar console was boasted as "The first 64-bit console", with the tag line "Do the math!" This was because it had two 32-bit processors, which does in fact "math up" to 64 bits, but that's not how bit-counting works. It doesn't help either that it gave the console a unique architecture from a developer's standpoint, making it very difficult to program games for and causing most games on it to not even come close to utilizing the system's power and leaving them on the level of 16-bit era games at best. This blatant lie coupled with the system's sub-par performance even compared to other 32-bit systems made it the last console Atari would make. Adding insult to injury, although the Nintendo 64 happily had a 64-bit graphics processornote Though, true to this trope, most games on the console ran in 32-bit mode and didn't use the 64-bit instructions at all, since 64-bits was completely superfluous for the kinds of games the N64 could run, and would be for most video games until the 8th generation., most consoles from that point forward focused on overall specs and iteration numbers rather than just the main processor's maximum word size.

As recorded in a The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar, a grocery store advertised "golden, ripe, boneless bananas."

Cable One, before they renamed themselves to Sparklight, used to advertise a speed of "50 Megs" or "50 Megs per second" in its radio commercials. They neglected to mention that it is megabits, and not megabytes as the commercial implies, which lowers the speed by a factor of eight - 50 megabits per second is only a little more than 6 megabytes per second.

This is actually a very common practice when referring to data transmission rates, leading to such things as "Gigabit Ethernet," a computer networking standard that involves transmitting up to a 1,000 bits per second. Of course, it is also common practice to specify when you are referring to bits or bytes.

A brand of cheese advertises that it's made with "100% fresh milk". Given that cheese is milk that's gone bad, fresh milk isn't exactly an asset when making it.

Among the many faux-artisanal trends adopted by fast food restaurants since the turn of the millennium, the most pointless was/is the marketing of burgers that proudly used Black Angus beef. Unlike other gimmicks such as chipotle sauce and ciabatta bread, this one doesn't require any new ingredients at all, because while the marketing makes it seem as if Angus is some exotic, special breed renowned for its exquisiteness, the truth is that it's the most common variety of beef cattle in the United States, and #2 in Western Europe. Similarly, restaurants touting Hass avocados or Madagascar vanilla are really just saying they use the most common variety on the market.

Many fast-food joints will also make a big to-do about "fresh, never frozen" meat in their marketing. Putting fresh meat in your home freezer will make a difference, since the process is slow and the water inside will form big ice crystals; this ruptures the cell walls, causing the meat to weep out a lot of its moisture on thawing and turn dry once cooked. Customers are meant to assume this is what restaurants who use frozen meat are doing, too, but that is false. Pre-frozen foods are always instantly flash-frozen using extreme cold, meaning that ice crystals don't have time to form and the meat thaws out with the same consistency and texture it had when fresh; anyone with a refined enough palate to tell the difference probably isn't eating fast food to begin with.

For a while Apple kept touting that every new feature of Mac OS X came with "Over 300 features!" or something like that. While a lot of these could be considered features some of them were simply including language support in a development tool (that you could download anyway), removal of a feature, among other minor changes that nobody would really care about.

One of the oldest examples comes from Lucky Strike cigarettes, whose packaging proudly bragged that "It's Toasted!" all the way back in 1917. All cigarette tobacco is toasted,note The implication was that competitors used sun-dried tobacco, but in reality none of them did because sun-dried curing takes far longer compared to using artificial heat, and that decreases production volume and speed. but consumers drew the conclusion that other brands somehow used untoasted tobacco, and this false assumption made Luckies the top-selling brand for decades.

In mid-2016, Antarctica was declared the most LGBT-friendly continent. This probably has more to do with the nature of Antarctica (no permanent residents, no companies or corporations based in Antarctica), and the fact that there aren't any laws (either favorable or unfavorable towards the LGBT set) in Antarctica, just laws governing what other countries can and cannot do there (for example, no military installments) than anything else. It's literally true that Antarctica is more LGBT-friendly than any other continent...but kind of deceptively so. Though that might have been the point: not advertising Antarctica but showing how NON-friendly all those continents with people and societies on them were and encouraging them to do better than Antarctica.

It's very common to see cheap projectors sold online with impressively high resolution mentioned in the product title, only for the detailed specs to reveal that this is the input resolution rather than the resolution it displays. So yes, the projector will happily accept a 1080p Full HD image... but it only has the hardware to project that 1080p image scaled down to 480p.

In Britain in the late 1990s, several start-up ISPs (most notably Freeserve) offered "free" internet access — no contract, just dial their number. What they carefully omitted to mention is that it was free of subscription charges and contract obligations, not free of all charges; fees for online time were levied via the cost of the call (the pay-as-you-go model), and like most PAYG services, it was the most expensive way of doing it. One of their rivals advertised their (conventional) ISP services as "cheaper than free".

One brand of folding bicycle was advertised as having 'extra large 20" wheels' (as compared with other folding bikes, which had ordinary 20" wheels). One problem with this is that there is no such bike wheel size as "extra large" — there is only "small" (up to 24") and "standard" (26" or 27").

Any gambling that gets promoted with slogans like "you'll never win if you don't play", which is is trivially true for all games. Even worse: in most cases, the chances are that you'll still lose if you do play.

Cable and satellite companies comparing their broadband Internet speeds to DSL. Although DSL is much slower than what they're likely offering, what they don't tell you is, most residential homes aren't even going to be using DSL in the first place (and certainly almost no businesses would use it, either). Today's society is so Internet-dependent that DSL, while state-of-the-art late in The '90s or at the Turn of the Millennium, just doesn't cut it for most people now. The only people that are going to be using DSL are people who live in remote areas where cable and fiber Internet are not available, low-income households that can't afford to get anything faster (or else they would), or people (generally older) who use the Internet sparingly (i.e. people that either can't get broadband, or have no interest in it to begin with). So they're really comparing apples and oranges.

The factual accuracy of such claims can vary, too. DSL technologies have also been improving, and VDSL2 can offer up to 300 megabits per second under ideal conditions. G.Fast can deliver speeds approaching a whopping gigabit per second, and the experimental 10G.Fast can deliver even more. Their main limitation is that they need a telephone line that is very short and made with good quality wiring, almost always requiring the provider to bring the fiber to a streetside cabinet or the basement of the building.

Check out any baby name book advertising on the cover that it has tens of thousands of names in it. Betcha anything they're counting 15 spellings apiece of Brittany, Megan, and Carly as 45 individual names.

Oftentimes, partway through the airing of a show's first season, the network will put out a press release trumpeting that the second season has already been greenlit. While this sounds good, it's mostly Trivially Obvious if you know anything about production schedules, especially for animated shows. Chances are pretty good that unless it's a limited series or the production has been a complete disaster, the crew probably started work on the second season well before the first started airing. If the show looked promising enough to air, the producers weren't going to have the cast and crew sit on their haunches for months on end until the first reviews and ratings finally started coming in.

Listerine's success has been credited less to the mouthwash than its marketing of "halitosis," or bad breath.

Defied in an example of a law practice whose claim was, "All our lawyers are juris doctors." A juris doctorate is a law degree — one of the two basic things required to practice law (the other being a law license). The advertisement was found to be in violation of the ethics rules because it misled potential clients into believing that the juris doctorate was something not all attorneys have, implying that the offending firm was unique in that regard.

Croonchy Stars. Blurbs on the box read "No artificial colors! No doorknobs!" and "This product does not contain (among other things) Venetian Blinds and Pachyderms".

One Sanderson Farms commercial has a marketing whiz throwing out various buzzwords like "no antibiotics!" and "gluten-free!" to which the two poultry farmers in the ad point out that none of the chicken you can buy has antibiotics in it by federal law, and chicken has no gluten by default.

Audio Play

Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album has the String sketch, where an advertiser is looking for a way to sell 122,000 miles of string... in 3-inch lengths. Among others, the advertiser describes them as pre-sliced, rust-proof, easy to handle, low-calorie, and free from artificial coloring. When he learns they're not waterproof, he switches to water-absorbent.

On 30 Rock, Liz felt socially responsible because her awesome new jeans had a "Hand made in USA" label. Then Jack corrected her pronunciation, revealing that the jeans were made by the "Hohnd" people, slave laborers in the despotic island nation of "Usa" (pronounced like "Oosa").

The Goodies: On "It Might as Well Be String" (a spoof of the advertising industry), their ad campaign for Sunbeam Sliced Bread claims that "nine out of ten doctors agree that people who eat Sunbeam Sliced Bread are less likely to be trampled to death by elephants". Graeme does mention that it was a struggle to find the right nine doctors, however. And the elephants.

Gob's banana stand in Arrested Development. "Finally a frozen banana that won't make you sick and kill you!"

Inverted on The Daily Show, when a pediatrics group advocated against hot dogs, Aasif Mandvi gave "threats" about eating hot dogs, like "Eating hot dogs provides none of your daily fruit intake", "People that eat hot dogs have a 100% chance of dying", and "If you lined up all of the deaths from hot dogs, they would stretch some of the distance to the Sun".

Top Gear: During a series 11 news segment, the team goes over the advertisement for the Citroen Berlingo (one of the cheapest cars on the market at the time). All of the special features listed in the ad are things that are found on pretty much every single car on the market, but the best of them is when it says that the car features "manually adjustable door mirrors".

Jeremy Clarkson: As opposed to what? The only alternative is electrical, isnt it? Richard Hammond: Which are better, so that's just saying it's something it hasn't got.

Magazines and Periodicals

The MAD book Madvertising (Or, Up Madison Avenue) (1972) had some gags promoting a nonexistent product to mock this sort of labeling:

Ron's Only tomato sauce: "Does not contain any linseed oil or shirt starch"

Mr. Chipper cookies: "And no one has ever died from eating our brand!"

S&R trading stamps: "Backed with a special glue that won't give you cancer of the tongue!"

Golf gasoline: "NO WATER to rust your tank! NO MOLASSES to gum up your engine!"

Portland-based BANG! Magazine had a parody of Sega Genesis' "Blast Processing" advertisements. It boasts that unlike most electronic tablets, BANG! has "[a] solar-powered reflective surface, a recharge time of 0.0000, a higher-resolution screen than even the Retina display, [and] DRM-free content".

One Calvin and Hobbes strip had Calvin come up with an idea for selling "Calvin's Curative Elixir". When Hobbes pointed out that it was drainage water with leaves in it, he described it as "Fortified With Chlorophyll". This also serves as a Genius Bonus for those who remember that fortifying things with chlorophyll was an actual fad in the 1950s.

One Close to Home strip has a company claiming their pasta sauce contains no slorbates. When asked what a slorbate is by a new employee, it's explained that there is no such thing, it just boosts sales if customers think they're avoiding something unhealthy.

Other Internet

Many submissions (usually around April 1) of tool-assisted speedruns to TASVideos.org mention that the run "does not color a dinosaur." (Color a Dinosaur is an infamously low-quality coloring book for the NES, and is considered by TASVideos to be a bad game choice.)

A study of drinking water disinfectants expresses concern that iodine based disinfectants are not regulated by the EPA in drinking water. Of course, this is because it is unheard of to disinfect water with iodine unless you're a backwoods hiker (and even then, portable filters are far more popular these days). Every system uses the much cheaper chlorine.

Seanbaby mocks the common use of "Fat Free!" on sugary candies in this article:

"Are you insecure, candy? Because you don't see gravy bragging about being sugar free. This label is so irrelevant to consumer health that I think it's only there so doctors can laugh when they ask you questions about how you got diabetes."

YouTube channel Outside Xbox: the only review show guaranteed not to harvest your organs and sell them on the black market! (Claim at start of this video).

Mike: Do other shows really do that? Andy: I don't see them guaranteeing that they won't.

Boneless Pizza (warning: sensory abuse) is a strange case of someone asking for this specifically and becoming irate when it's suggested that what they want is only made in the way they're specifying.

Game Theory once said the food company that sponsored one of their videos produced food that was "Radiation free". Then again, the fact that the video that was sponsored was a Fallout video means it was obviously tongue in cheek. Although some food (mostly canned goods) IS disinfected with radiation, although this is quite rare because everyone is scared of radiation.

The fine products and services that sponsor Behind The Bastards' are repeatedly emphasised to not cause whatever horribleness that week's bastard did, including (but not limited to) not killing any children, not starting any brainwashing cults, and not banning the use of the word 'ketchup'.

Radio

A Prairie Home Companion has segments "sponsored" by "Old Folks at Home Cottage Cheese", which is the only brand of cottage cheese which promises right on the label that it contains no arsenic and no formaldehyde. We're not saying other cottage cheeses do, but isn't it suspicious that they've never come out and said so?

Tabletop Games

Truly bad cards in Magic: The Gathering tend to get two kinds of comments made about them: Blatant Lies claims about their power and Metagame reputation, and meaningless claims about the card's value - Asbestos-Free Cardstock, as it were. Take the Gatherer comments for Chimney Imp, for example. One comment (by user Laguz) reminds us that the five lands you had to tap to cast it untap the next turn with no drawback (which, barring other effects, they always do), it's immune to dying by Deathmark (as is every other black/red/blue nongreen/nonwhite creature), and it implicitly has the ability Rampage: 0 (which is like saying "1+0=1" and treating it like something special about the number one).

Urban Legends

A newspaper advert for a "Genuine Mexican coathanger. Only $5." When the curious shoppers send away for their coathanger, they receive a rusty nail.

An advert explaining that, while marijuana cannot be sold through the mail, "grass" can. People who fell for it got a packet of lawn clippings.

A company that was selling clotheslines as "wind-powered clothes dryers".

Canned tuna/salmon:

A tuna company that gets a shipment of accidentally bleached tuna and markets it with the slogan "doesn't turn pink in the can!" A common variation includes a competitor selling the pink product putting out a competing slogan, "never bleached!"

This story is also told about canned salmon. In this (somewhat more likely) version of the tale, the salmon in question was simply a different variety whose flesh was paler, and the advertising campaign was meant to quell consumer fears that something was wrong with the white salmon.

There's a third version of this story out there in which the white salmon is advertised as a rare delicacy with a price to match, even though there's no difference in flavor or quality between it and regular salmon.

Farm-raised pink salmon are often fed red food dyes to turn pink (wild salmon eat shrimp, which colors their meat; farm-raised salmon is usually fed cornmeal and fish meal, resulting in a white meat). Undyed salmon advertised as such is probably just a question of time.

The dihydrogen monoxide hoax is an inversion of this practice, where something totally harmless is made to sound incredibly deadly, using true but misleading statements.

Video Games

One of the games in Rhythm Heaven Fever, "Packing Pests", has the player working at the "Spider-Free Candy Company". In this case, they seem to have a lot of spiders at the packing plant, which you swat away as you pack candy. Granted, if you mess up, that just means there'll be a few spiders in the package, not in the candy itself.

Aperture Scienceshower curtains contain less than 1% mercury. Given that Aperture's other products tend to be radioactive, laden with asbestos, or otherwise harmful, they might actually think this is an achievement worth advertising.

This also shows up in the memetic "Diggersby, tho?!" rant. The narrator praises Diggersby's Huge Power ability, which treats its Attack stat as doubled in combat. Diggersby has a poor Attack stat to begin with, so even with Huge Power it's not outstanding, and the rest of its stats are mediocre at best. Additionally, Huge Power is not unique to Diggersby (it is a Lethal Joke Character due to its ridiculously strong Earthquakes, but it is not some overwhelmingly strong monster).

Hiram: Now people will think other stores' orange juice is full of evil!

Basic InstructionsThis comic pokes fun at the Rolling Stones song for saying "You might find that you get what you need", as implying with the word "might" it's possible you don't even get that either.

Web Animation

Bubs from Homestar Runner sells donuts shipped from a third-world country named Homemáde, so he could legally print "From Homemáde" on the box.

Ed, Edd n Eddy: After most of an episode of Eddy being hit by multiple terrible things because of a supposedly-cursed phone in "Sorry, Wrong Ed", one of his scams consists of selling rebranded Chunky Puffs cereal that is guaranteed to be "100% curse-free".

The Simpsons: Dr. Nick advertises with the line "If I kill you, you don't pay!"

One South Park episode features a commercial for "Weight Gain 4000", a kind of protein shake that boasts "its patented formula is designed to enter the mouth, and go to directly to the stomach where it is distributed to the bloodstream!" Presumably, as opposed to all those foods that don't reach the stomach or get their nutrients in the bloodstream, the two things food is supposed to do.

Community

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